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Actually, it's kinda a logical extension of their original (somewhat overblown) mission of collecting as much data as possible, organizing it, and disseminating it as useful information to people. Lots of people have tried it (there was a disaster a few years ago where Wikipedia was used as an information store, as I remember) and it seems like a decent thing to do.

On top of that, Google is an advertising-based Internet startup that seems to have incongruously lasted 10 years longer than its expected lifespan. What part of, "Jump on every fad," doesn't fit into that?

Not necessarily true. We have one onsite desktop support tech in an office of twenty or thirty people. He gets everything done in approximately half time, because we use Google cloud apps for a huge percentage of our overall applications. He also does purchasing of all new machines, etc. in that half time....

So, yeah, cloud stuff is slightly more efficient in my view. The backups required for all that e-mail, all the setup stuff, etc...... Just harder to do without cloud apps.

And, of course, there are consulting companies selling cloud apps like mad at the moment, too. Salesforce consultants are some of the most highly paid in the industry, I'm fairly certain.

There must be some way to solve a problem like that, where you have a series of pointers to files, if not the files themselves as well, with the ability to add markers of some kind to each of those pointers. (maybe we can call them, "Records!!!" like CD's used to be called) And then! Then! We can disguise how the management of these 'records' are organized from the user, so they don't have to think about it. And give them a simple, logical way to get data about those 'records' out of the big, organized whole. It'd be, like, a whole new basic way to store our records! We could easily find what we wanted in our basic data storage. I can't believe noone's thought of it before.;)

My point here isn't that you should use a database to store your data about your files, (unfortunately, a unified markup system for files doesn't exist yet; it would be nice, but all that stuff is in the OS right now) my point is that the author of the article is missing that even if in-memory data systems do become extremely large, the underlying theory of the technology will not change much.

And the underlying theory relies heavily on caching, limiting how much of your overall dataset is currently relevant, and so on. While I will admit it's possible many databases' useful data size will eventually be outgrown by RAM-style memory storage, when that happens market forces will probably make it comparatively expensive to hold all your data in memory at once. Partially because clean, concise code is generally far more expensive to produce than sloppy crap that chews through your data storage.

Discarding data is something that, as a programmer, I don't often do. Too often I will need it later. Real time analytics are not going to change this. As long as hard drive storage continues to get cheaper, there's going to be more data stored. Partially because the easier it is to store large blocks the more likely I am to store bigger packets. I'd LOVE to store entire large XML blocks in databases sometimes, and we decide not to because of space issues. So, yeah, no. Datacenters aren't going anywhere. Things just get more complicated on the hosting side.

Note that the article writer is a strong stakeholder in his earthshattering predictions coming true.

Mike writes "Students from Turkey's Sakarya University have unveiled a remarkable attempt at creating Europe's most fuel-efficient vehicle. Dubbed the Sahimo, their pint-sized hydrogen car is cable of eking out an incredible 568 km on 1 liter of fuel (about 1,336 miles per gallon). An aerodynamic carbon-fiber construction keeps the vehicle's weight down to less than 110 kg (243 lbs), and the designers hope to push the Sahimo's performance even further to a full 1,000 km per 1 liter of fuel before participating in the Global Green Challenge in October."

This opinion is inane, trollish, and should be modded into oblivion. The very idea that a major publication could do any reporting at all if they meant actual harm to the US military is ludicrous. Their embedded reporter numbers would go down in comparison to their competitors, their assistance in foreign countries would be less on the ball, etc. Life's rough for actual investigative reporting right now, anyways, so they're not picking any fights.

Want to see an agency with every reason to kick the US military when it's down? Check out the BBC. They're...... Not very nice. And actually more informative than a lot of our outlets.

But I think getting a huge piece of IBM would be a better idea. The patent porfolio alone would allow them to do neat things to everyone else in the software industry, and they would be in a good place to start Linux litigation worldwide.

Yeah, liberal arts degrees are worthless. It's obvious we have too many broadly educated people paying attention to the things that matter. We've got such good, well run, smartly limited government. It does everything we expect it to, and not much more.

seriously writes "We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how usable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM: 'Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.'"

After somewhere between 24 and 29 years of being an arrogant prick, I may have learned a little humility. I'm not sure whether it made an impression, but it bloody hurt. Now I blow glass and work for a tiny web company that supplies web ticketing services to local and community theatres. We're growing. It would be nice to have people not having to pay Ticketmaster or Fastixx such crazy prices, so I'm working on that, and maybe I'll eventually get a little wealthy in the process. Here's to luck and hard work making me look like I know what I'm doing.